Now, efforts by state leaders that began during the Obama administration to investigate and sometimes sanction these companies have taken on new urgency. State law enforcement officials view their role as both defending students and taxpayers from predatory practices and acting as a foil to Trump administration officials who they say want to roll back the progress that’s been made protecting students.

“When the Department of Education is turning a blind eye, enforcement is left to the states in this environment,” said Aaron Ament, the president of the National Student Legal Defense Network, which represents students who have attended for-profit colleges. “States are the only check on some of these predatory colleges that are promising false hopes to students while saddling them with thousands of dollars in debt,” added Ament, who was the chief of staff in the Department’s office of the general counsel during the Obama era.

The Department of Education didn’t respond to a request for comment.

California is suing for-profit schools and the Dept. of Education

In California, which has been ground zero for both the predatory practices faced by students and efforts to fight them, the state’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra has been actively pursuing litigation against for-profit colleges and the Department of Education. The state is currently suing Ashford University and its parent company Bridgeport Education over claims the school misrepresented both the costs of the school and career prospects for its graduates. Last month, a judge ruled the case could move forward over the objection of the company.

Staff from the Becerra’s office met last week with Office of Management and Budget officials about concerns over the borrower defense rule, which allows students to have federal loans forgiven if they’ve been defrauded by their college.

Some fear an ‘explosion in fraud’

These efforts are particularly important in this political environment, Becerra said, because he worries that for-profit colleges and student loan companies view the Trump administration’s posture towards the industry as an opportunity to prey on students. “The worst thing” that’s happened since DeVos took office, Becerra said is that “the Trump Universities can come back to life and take advantage of these students and their families.”

“From that point on is when we had this huge explosion in fraud,” he said. And indeed, the late 2000s were boom times for for-profit colleges as workers looked to retool during and after the recession.

Under Trump, Miller said his office hasn’t necessarily seen an uptick in nefarious activity, “but that’s a real risk of what’s going on in Washington and we want to play a role in countering that,” he said. That includes continuing to monitor these companies closely for misrepresentation in marketing and other forms of fraud. Miller has also signed onto multi-state lawsuits against DeVos over rollbacks of Obama-era rules aimed at holding for-profit colleges accountable for providing students with poor outcomes.

The decision by Devos’s Department of Education to weaken these regulations is particularly pernicious, said Brian Frosch, Maryland’s attorney general. The gainful employment rule — the implementation of which the Department has delayed and watered down — penalized career colleges or schools that prepare students specifically for a job when too few of their graduates made progress repaying their loans. The borrower defense rule looked to make it easier for borrowers who had been defrauded by their schools to have their loans forgiven.

‘The federal government was supposed to protect these folks’

Frosch said he feels like his job has taken on new urgency in light of those changes.

“It’s the same role, but larger,” he said. “It’s not that we have any more resources, but the federal government was supposed to protect these folks and they’re not only not protecting them, they’re taking away protections that had been in place.”

State law enforcement officials investigated and enforced the law against for-profit colleges well before the Trump administration took office, but in the absence of aggressive federal regulations, states are “continuing to step up to protect their residents,” said Lisa Stifler, the state policy deputy director at the Center for Responsible Lending.

Massachusetts is doing what it can to rein in student loan servicers...

Those efforts include continuing to pass and defend laws that require student loan servicers to abide by certain rules to operate in their states. That’s despite DeVos issuing a memo earlier this year that said states don’t have the authority to regulate these companies because many of them operate on a contract with the federal government.

Still, Stifler said there’s more she’d like to see state officials do, including withdrawing the ability of for-profit colleges to operate in a state if they’re found to have engaged in misconduct. She also pointed to rules governing for-profit colleges issued by Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey as an example of proactive actions states can take to protect their students.

“The bottom line is that the student debt crisis is having a real impact on our economy and on families across our state and across the country,” she said.

Given that, she said it’s “frustrating” to see DeVos’s Department of Education, “give a pass to these entities.” The administration’s actions give her role an increased importance in this space, Healey said.

“We’ve got to continue to do the job enforcing the laws to protect those from predatory or unfair practices,” she said. “But we also have to work really hard now to deal with the U.S. Department of Education that wants to take us backwards and allow that kind of exploitation and cheating to go forward.”

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